I got a fund-raising email this morning from Giffords.org asking me to donate to their cause. I have no idea why they thought I might respond, maybe they bought a customer list from Lee Precision thinking it was Lee jeans, but here's the "money quote":

But at the start of the month, we set a goal of 15,000 individual
donations for December. We thought that would put us in good shape when
the new Congress is sworn in. And as of this morning, we were at 4,983.
Not great.

Great, like most adjectives, is a relative term. For Giffords, in the face of a Dem controlled House, getting a 30% response might be described as "not great". For me, considering the same circumstances, coupled with excited media coverage for the more rabid true believers, this is not bad news. I would have to say that the probability of another run on ammo or guns is much reduced.

Don't get cocky. Write your Senators and tell them to NOT support any gun control legislation in the face of falling crime rates. Keep reminding them which side of the toast has the butter.

Monday, December 24, 2018

Got the original cylinder off, tore it apart, reassembled it carefully, and it refuses to work in any configuration. Screw it, I have a 2" cylinder to temporarily replace it with.

Turned the table over and soaked the working parts in gas over night, and voila! it turns, however reluctantly. I'm thinking it should free up with some use.

Put in the new air cylinder, after finding out that the Bellows company seems to have used some thread pitches not listed in the charts of standard SAE threads. They also installed a set screw in a spot that requires a good deal of disassembly before it can be either seen or reached and in a spot where attempted disassembly will cause damage to some fairly important threaded parts.

The new cylinder moves the table fairly easily with only 25-30 psi air which means only 75-90 lb force. a smaller cylinder will do the job, say 1-1/5" dia running at a modest 50 psi.
That brass pipe sticking out the center is the air supply to the little cylinders on the top. Unfortunately it hangs down a couple of inches below the bottom of the table and over the years it has been bent and banged up. I will need a banjo fitting for that at some point.

Still have no idea how the top is supposed to be removed from the bottom, and there is no indexing mechanism to set the table after each rotation. Oh well, some assembly is required.

Wednesday, December 19, 2018

I was originally going to post this on Hot Air here, but they seem to be fully vested members of the Vast Left-wing conspiracy to let Big Tech censor everything by requiring a Facebook membership to be allowed to speak there. Shame on you guys!

They do have a piece up noting that it is now possible for computers to generate exceptionally realistic human faces. This opens up a lot of possibilities for TV News stations, politicians, and blackmailers of all sorts.

This is a technological jump over the proposal I fronted 2 or 3 years ago. Then, I suggested that animatronic robots could be used to to replace the high priced talking heads on the nightly news with only a wig change required to get from news to sports, and with lipstick, to weather. Now even that is no longer required. The CG heads can recite whatever a committee of wonks has decided is news, and if there's bias, it's distributed across the committee and no one gets fired. Cost of software and regular upgrades would be far less than the annual salaries of the actors currently staring back from the screens.

Tuesday, December 18, 2018

On election day, the Dow stood at 26,180 and change. Today, as of 10:03 EST, it's at 23,900, a loss of 2880 points.

The Dems don't get to start warming their chairs in the House for another month yet, and the Dow is down 11%. You'd think the Dems had taken the whole banana and Hillary was about to name BHO as her chief economic adviser. Still, the DJIA is a forward-looking indicator so maybe the market mavens see something coming that we don't, and the MSM won't.

Remember, if the market crashes, the only thing to change is the makeup of the House so that would be the place to lay the blame.

Since taxation and spending bills originate in the House, and the House seems to be preparing for 2 years of all out effort to overturn the results of the '16 election and nothing else, maybe there is some cause to worry.

Monday, December 17, 2018

No, I did not find an old Ferrari in a barn. Much more mundane than that. I helped a friend move his machine shop, and as his new digs are much cozier than the old ones, He generously gifted me with a doorstop.

This is a 24 stage rotary feed table, with 7 "stations" and one empty. Not shown is the big brass air cylinder which normally attaches to the right hand side of the thing and causes the upper part to rotate when activated. So far I have been unable to get the cylinder to move at all except by pushing it in and out manually. The valve attached to it is a marvel to behold, and possibly an even bigger marvel to make work. I've removed the cylinder and disassembled the valve. I may sent it to the Smithsonian with my blessing as long as they promise not to send it back.

The Table is a product of the Bellows Company, which seems to have vanished from the face of the earth unless the Schraeder/Bellows/Parker company is the corporate descendant of it. Anyone in Akron know anything? That's where the thing was reputedly made. There's even a Bellows St in Akron so there's a possibility there are drawings for this thing there.

Having removed the recalcitrant air cylinder and soaked the underpinnings in gasoline, I'm seeing some movement of the upper part, however reluctant.

I'm thinking of trying to make a fully functional reloading press out of this at some point, but having something this steampunk ker-chunking about might serve even as a piece of art. No one has any idea what this thing was used for originally.

This is no better than its ever been. Of course my provider is employing an old retired telegraph operator to relay my page requests on to whomever it is that actually provides them, so when I ask for a page I can almost hear the clacking of the brass telegraph key.

Monday, December 10, 2018

The Oh-So-P.C. city council of Boulder passed an ordinance forbidding the ownership of "assault weapons" but in a gesture of good will, they allowed the ownership of weapons acquired prior to the passage of the law. If you live in Boulder and want an evil black rifle, or whatever it is they define as an assault weapon, you'll have to drive a few miles to Erie or Longmont to get one. Of course if you get caught coming home with it, you could get a ticket:

The city council promised that there would be no records kept, and no registration as a precursor to future confiscation. Compliance, for all practical purposes, would be left up to the gun-owning citizens themselves.

Boulder City Attorney Tom Carr said that anyone found with a “non-certified” firearm in his possession after December 27 would be subject to a fine of up to $1,000 and (not or) 90 days in jail. The now-illegal firearm would be confiscated and destroyed.

Emphasis mine. No mention of what might happen if you claim to have owned the weapon for the last 5 years and forgot to get it registered certified.

The paper process involves paying a fee, for which the city would give you a receipt, of which they would keep a copy along with a note explaining what the money was collected for, getting another background check, of which they would keep a copy along with a note explaining why they had it done, and give you 2 copies of your certification papers, one of which must be kept with the gun.

The story is here along with some math (show your work!) suggesting that there might be as many as 150,000 "assault weapons" in need of "non-registration" up there. So far, and with 17 days left to go before they all become criminals, some 85 guns have been registered certified for a compliance rate of .056%.

Wednesday, December 5, 2018

Here's the latest NICS count, with the usual caveat that a NICS check has only about a 71% chance of actually representing a gun sale:

I will interpret this as a position of confidence that although the House will likely pass lots of gun bills, a Republican Senate will likely vote them down in committee. Of course this sets up the Donks to propose every half-baked anti gun idea ever heard of in the expectation that they will all get tossed so they can tell their constituents that they tried, and that their next opponent will forget that they did this and won't use it against them.

There are ways around this but it remains to be seen if the Dems will try them or push very hard if they do. A Dem can, under the upcoming regime, attach a draconian anti gun bit to one of the "must pass" bills that will come up, and dig in to the point of threatening a government shutdown and blame Republicans for valuing the lack of "common sense gun control" for failing to say, fund the military.

Of course this could work both ways with the Reps loudly proclaiming that the Dems would render the country defenseless in order to let them revert to type, abridging the civil rights of the citizens.

Monday, December 3, 2018

‘Honorable, gracious and decent’: In death, Bush becomes a yardstick for President Trump

I interpret this to mean that the WaPo thinks that now that H W Bush is dead, and has advanced from Chimpy McBushitler to honorable great statesman, the only way Trump will be able to live up to that standard would be for him to drop dead.